Rice in the time of Cholera

Last week Mario and I spent a day traveling around the Artibonite region of Haiti. It's now famous as the birthplace of the Cholera epidemic here. It's also the main region for rice cultivation and provides 75 per cent of all rice produced in Haiti. For me this is a sad place full of beautiful photos. The area regularly get walloped by any passing storm and floods at the drop of a hat - or it sits barren and dry because the irrigation system is antiquated and rigged - another source of power and money.
This has been a bad year for Haiti in general but it has been a worse year for the rice farmers. Farmers who bought their seeds on credit are now looking at selling for a 25 per cent loss. That means not a penny of profit and a growing mountain of debts. And in this country the only recourse when things are too calamitous to conquer, people pack up what they have and move to a big city to live in abject poverty hoping to scratch a enough money together a day to eat something. 
So on the day we drove around speaking with people we found many stories of people saying that they work the fields even though they make no money because there is just nothing else to do.
But we did find one story that gave me a little hope. I've always questioned the idea of importing items into a country that can and does produce it. Commercially it make sense, but when it come to aid organizations, well, I've always wondered if there wasn't a way of developing an industry and still feeding the poor. So it was nice to find that the World Food Program is doing just that. This year alone they have an order in for 400 tonnes of locally produced rice that will be used in their distributions. Now the only question that remains to be seen is whether or not it can be produced with a high enough qaulity to satisfy everyone.
So following are all the photos from the story as I was told that some people don't like having to click to another site to see the whole story. But if any of you should so desire: www.minustah.org

Photos Logan Abassi UN/MINUSTAH

The first set of photos is of the planting, done by hand and barefoot in a mud so sticky it kept threatening to rob me of my rubber boots.

This next section is harvesting - spending a day bent over double in the driving heat cutting the stalks by hand.

And this is what they use to cut the stalks. What year are we in?

These ladies here are in the story in minustah.org. They were having a horrific time. Not only is most of the rice ruined from the flooding caused by the hurricane, but they had a pest infestation in the rice, and because of the Cholera less people are buying rice the region causing the price to drop drastically.

Sifting debris, husk and sand from the rice the old fashioned way.

This group of women are sifting, cleaning and bagging rice that will go to the World Food Program's distributions. They make a set wage of somewhere in the $3 USD a day range.

The dust that comes off the rice coats everything.

Truly hand filtered.

Once the rice is cleaned, it's bagged and shipped around the country where it's needed to help feed thousands of people struggling to survive everyday.